Anthony Martin Fernando: the Aboriginal activist who took his people’s fight to London

Pedestrians and commuters along one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares are arrested at the spectacle directly outside the Edwardian baroque marble facade of Australia House on the corner of the Strand and Aldwych.

They see an elderly, longhaired, Australian Aboriginal man. He is dressed in a black greatcoat. The only contrast to his dark appearance is a full, silver beard and a cape upon which are attached dozens of small white rubber skeletons. He also wears a sandwich board placard of the type used by street vendors, all across the city, to advertise their wares.

But this old man, Anthony Martin Fernando, a toymaker by trade, is not advertising his products. Instead, his placard condemns the appalling treatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in colonial and newly federated Australia.

Fernando repeatedly points to the little skeletons and cries out to passers-by: “This is all that Australia has left of my people.”

Fernando was also a regular speaker at London’s Hyde Park Corner during the 1930s.

“Make it plain that you have no time for war, that you have more important things to do. Outside every big city on earth, mark off a field, build high walls around it, and there let the diplomats and marshals of the earth shoot each other. That's what you could do, little man, if only you'd stop shouting hurrah, hurrah and stop believing that you're a nobody without an opinion of your own.”